Clark
D. Cunningham

W. Lee
Burge Chair in Law & EthicsThe Burge Chair was
established by an endowment from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District
of Georgia, using funds collected for alleged lawyer misconduct to promote ethics,
professionalism and access to justice.

&nbsp &nbsp On June 1, 2002 Professor Cunningham became the first incumbent of
the W. Lee Burge Chair in Law & Ethics at the Georgia State University College
of Law. He is the Director of the National
Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism (NIFTEP), a consortium
of ethics centers at six universities, and the Co-Editor of the International Forum on Teaching Legal Ethics & Professionalism (www.teachinglegalethics.org). He is a member of the Advisory Board for the Academic and Professional Development Committee of the International Bar Association, having previously served as Vice-Chair (Research) for a two-year term.From 2007-2008 he served as the Convenor
of the Steering Committee of the Global Alliance
for Justice Education, an international organization of over 700 law teachers,
lawyers, and leaders of non-governmental organizations from more than 50 countries. In 2006 he was admitted to membership in The
Society of Writers to Her Majesty's Signet in recognition of his work which
has led to fundamental changes in the ways client relationship skills are taught and evaluated
in Great Britain. At the time he was only the second American to become a member
of The Society, the oldest professional association of lawyers in the world, which
is charged with custody of the royal seal of the British monarchy. He served as an international member of the Expert Advisory Group for the Learning and Teaching Standards Project-Law of the Australian Learning & Teaching Council (ALTC) which prepared new threshold learning outcomes for legal education in Australia that have since been adopted by the Council of Australian Law Deans; he also was a member of the Project Reference Group for another project supported by the ALTC, Curriculum Renewal in Legal Education: Articulating Final Year Curriculum Design Principles and Designing a Transferable Final Year Program.&nbsp&nbsp He publishes on a variety of topics with an emphasis on interdisciplinary
and comparative scholarship. His article
in the Iowa Law Review, applying semantics to analyze the ways the
meaning of "search" has evolved in U.S. constitutional law, won the national Scholarly
Papers Competition sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools. "Plain Meaning
and Hard Cases," published in the Yale Law Journal and co-authored with three linguists, has been described by Justice Ginsburg as providing useful information on difficult statutory interpretation issues in three different pending Supreme Court cases that were given a linguistic analysis in the article. His article, "Passing
Strict Scrutiny: Using Social Science to Design Affirmative Action Programs,"
Georgetown Law Journal (2002), was co-authored with two social scientists
and was based on a friend of the court brief he filed in Adarand
Constructors v Mineta, argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001. &nbsp&nbsp
He is a leading American scholar on the legal system of India and has consulted
around the world on reform in legal education. He has been a visiting scholar
at the Indian Law Institute, Sichuan University (China), the University of Sydney
(Australia), University of Palermo (Argentina), and the National Law School of
India. He directed a three year Ford Foundation project to support the development
of human rights clinics in Indian law schools. In 1997 he organized and chaired
an international conference, Rethinking
Equality in the Global Society, that brought together leading legal scholars,
social scientists and policy makers from India, South Africa and the United States
to examine affirmative action policies from a cross-national and interdisciplinary
perspective.
&nbsp&nbsp He is a member of
the Chief Justice of Georgia's
Commission on Professionalism and served on the Fulton
County Criminal Justice Blue Ribbon Commission, whose report on improving
criminal justice in metropolitan Atlanta, issued in 2006, was adopted unanimously
by the Board of Commissioners of Fulton County. In 2004 he served as Co-Reporter
to Georgia's Commission
on Indigent Defense. He has served as an expert
on legal ethics in a number of major cases and his reasoning has been adopted
by the Missouri Supreme Court and federal courts in Georgia and Illinois in decisions
disqualifying lawyers for conflicts of interest. He has served as a Special Master, appointed by the Georgia Supreme Court
to exercise general supervision over lawyer disciplinary proceedings and to make findings of fact and conclusions of law as to whether discipline should be imposed.
&nbsp&nbsp He has been an active public interest lawyer, as
a legal aid lawyer and civil rights litigator prior to his academic career, as
a clinical professor at the University of Michigan, as director of the Washington
University Urban Law Clinic (1989-94) and as director of the Washington University Criminal
Justice Clinic (1995-98). At GSU he has taught courses in which he and his students have appeared on behalf of criminal defendants, including a complex multi-defendant murder case, and have represented domestic violence victims in civil protection order proceedings. He has litigated a number of federal class action law
suits, argued before the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Sixth Circuit, and authored friend-of-the court briefs filed
in the Michigan Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1987-89 Professor
Cunningham was a Clinical Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan
Law School. From 1989-1993 he was an Associate Professor at the Washington University
School of Law in St. Louis; he was promoted to full Professor with tenure in 1993
and continued to teach at Washington University through May 2002.